184

Here's an attempt at digital painting. This is a character from a big project I'm working on (I posted some concept stuff a while back and will post more soon).

183

More cartoony-influenced stuff.

Pardon the crappy scans the past few days. I sketch with an H lead - and sketch lightly. So after I scan, I have to MAJORLY darken up my pencils in Photoshop. Hence the crappy look.

182

More applying a cartoony sense to my mainstream drawings. Again, getting there. Not quite yet.

181

So, this past weekend I've been spending a lot of time sketching. I've got some artistic blocks I need to break. Now that I'm a year done with my program, I feel like I get the basics, and pretty well. I now get to spend the next year finding my voice/myself/style in my art. So, I've been playing with a more cartoony look. Here are some of the results.

I've been trying to apply that cartoony physique to my art. Taking the basic form, but simplifying it to have more fun with it - making it more dynamic. It's not there yet, but it's been fun to let the idea inform my drawings.

180

Here is another piece I colored for a friend. Max Young posted this on Periodic Heroes and I loved it so much I begged the original off of his and then colored it.

179

The last commission of the show I did was for a guy who walked up with two themed sketch books. As soon as he said "Lost" I almost jumped over the table to grab it. Though I was burned by the last season, the experience of watching that show for 6 years was a major highlight to my entertainment life.

Traditionally, I'll do a one-character sketch for the baseline price. As soon as I started looking at the sketchbook and all the other pics people had drawn, I knew I had to give him a little extra. This is what he got (crappy camera phone picture, apologies):

Keeping in mind that this thing is only like 4x7 and done with just some marker pens, I think it turned out pretty darn well. The guy, needless to say, was ecstatic too. He loved it. I loved it. There was loving all around.

Oh Lost, how I love thee. This reminded me how much I still do. Guess it's time to rewatch the show, finally.

178

Another Con Sketch.

Decided to add his flying horse cause IT'S A FLYING HORSE!!!

177

So, some of the cool people that actually paid me to draw for them (I know, right?) were cool enough to post pics of some of my commissions. I need to get a wand scanner so I can post the work I do at shows, cause I never remember to take pics. But I managed to get sent copies of a few.

This guy is one of the Blue Lanterns (like Green, but blue). Had a fun time on his pants and clothing folds.

176

So, for the upcoming theme (yes, sneak peek here!) on Periodic Heroes, we're doing characters from DC Comics. I wanted to draw their new Supergirl, cause they're focusing on the teenage aspect of the character.

Drawing people flying is much harder than you'd think. It's easy to do the straight-body, blasting ahead type of look - but would you really fly like that. I think, just like walking, flying posture would infer personality and state of mind. So I wanted to draw a little more awkward, more wide-eyed flying Supergirl. I also toned it with grey markers (the markers don't scan as well as they look in person, FYI).

Tune in next Monday on Periodic Heroes to see the finished, color version.

175

So, as we near Baltimore Comic Con, all the guys I'm going with (and I, to a degree) are rushing to finish getting things together. Getting prepped for a convention is a lot of work, believe it or not. Luckily, this being my third show this year that I have a table at, it's gotten a lot less work. I have most of what I need already.

My good buddy Dave, however, found himself in a time crunch trying to get things done, so I volunteered to jump in and help. He was working on two prints, and I volunteered to color (at least one). So I got to flex my coloring muscles and work on someone else's work - which was scary in a whole new way - ha! Here is the B&W and then my colors. How'd I do?

174

Here's my latest set of sample pages from the Vertigo series Scalped. It's an awesome, gritty crime drama that takes place (mostly) on a depressed Indian Reservation. Anways, here's a six page sequence of a verbal showdown between the indian chief and a Hmong drug dealer he owes money to.

173

Though I'm trying to be better about double-dipping (posting the same stuff here as on DA and PH), I wanted to throw this up for completion sake.

I posted the linework for my Batman Last Supper piece a few months back, and I just finished the colors (finally) last night. Here it is!

I'll be honest - I don't know anything about coloring, really. I mean, I know the technical aspect of coloring in Photoshop, but when it comes to color theory, I have about zero training. So, all my coloring is me trying new things and seeing how it comes out. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I love doing it for fun.

172

Okay, so, as I finish up some new art (and before I scan some recent sketches), I thought I'd drop this here. I'm a bit of a process-nerd, so I wrote up a step by step for my Avengers piece. From concept to final piece. You can find the colored, finished piece here.

Pardon some of the crappy pics – they’re in-process shots from my phone that I was posting on twitter (@phillipsevy).

1.     Starting out, my main goal was Composition. Since this was a double page spread, I needed to make sure the overall comp was great and the individual page comp worked too. I used two different comp techniques. The red lines represent the “Rule of Thirds” (don’t quote me on any of the technical terms, I don’t know all the names and reasons, but I know how to use them (kinda)). Divide the page into thirds. Place major focal points at the intersections. The blue lines are where I used the Golden Spiral. A clockwise shape that brings your eye into the page and circles back to the middle. I made sure each page had those then applied the Golden Spiral to the entire piece. Yay! It worked.

2.     From there, I took my little 2 inch by 1 inch thumb and redrew it onto two full-sized boards taped together. Because I was going to ink and color this, I just penciled in non-photo blue. I worked out most of my figures but not too much worry about the costume (I’d detail each character individually before I inked them to keep the energy up). Again, you can see that my compositional elements still pretty much worked. Composition is hard cause if you try too hard it looks really obvious.

3.     And I’m off, starting with the larger foreground character (Black Widow). She turned out my least favorite out of all of them, unfortunately. But what can you do? At this point I’m inking with Pitt pens. I drop in some spot blacks here and there just for visual clarity, but will add the majority of large blacks later with a brush.

4.     For Iron Man, I wanted him to look tech and awesome. So I drew nearly every damn line with a ruler or French curve. He was freakin’ precise. He turned out pretty clean and sleek.

5.     I’m really just starting in the foreground and moving backwards. Parts of Giant Man and the Hulk.

6.     Captain America and Wasp.

7.     At this point, I’ve got my main linework done. One thing I paid close attention to was layering my black and white objects to create depth of field (the biggest tool you can use to make 2D look 3D). Main foreground (Iron Man) is white, step back and Black Widow is black, Hulk and Cap are white, and Giant Man is framing them with mostly black. Hawkeye is mostly black against a backdrop of white. Thor is dark against the same backdrop. And the ground under all of them is a lot of black, but with the detail, it becomes gray, pushing it into the background (visually).

8.     I drop in blacks with a brush and Copic sketch marker. Another thing to notice is that no character stands on their own. They all intersect and overlap. Overlap is huge to depth of field. I’ve circled some of the intersecting positions. I made it a point to have Giant Man encircling everyone (in the huddle) to frame them all together. Overlap grounds your characters in relation to one another.

9.     Pulled out my white gouche to make corrections and add smoke effect. I noticed that Giant Man looked like he was coming out the ground, so I added his back going back (to look like he’s laying instead). Fixed a few facial things as well.

10. Here is the scanned and cleaned up final B&W piece. Once in the computer I also moved Giant Man’s arm up. Before his one arm was twice the length of the other, so I tried to fix that digitally.

11. Once in Photoshop, I added my flats on two different layers. A background layer and a character layer. It makes it easier to make adjustments when they’re separate.

12. Then I rendered the crap out of everything. I color using the Hi-Fi method (go BUY the book – it’s EXCELLENT), so I use a brush set to Screen mode and use a lot of cuts and gradients. One thing I planned for (and colored accordingly) is light source. I have the light from Thor’s hammer, the light from Hawk’s exploding arrow, and the combined light of Iron Man’s blast and Black widow’s gun. I made sure to color with that in mind the entire time.

13. Once my rendering is done, I add some color holds. I color-holded the entire background (so to make it fade back) and my effects (blasts and the like). Originally I thought I would color hold the whole ground and loads of other stuff, but by the time I got to this point, I realized that it didn’t need it.

14. The final step was to add some effects. I knew the whole time that the main effect would be Thor’s lightning, so I colored in preparation for that. And who doesn’t love some Iron Man repulsor glow?

And, that’s that. All in all, about 9-10 hours to draw it and about 9 hours to color. A lot, yes, but consider the size – 22 x 17. Pretty darn big.

171

Well, do you remember those concept sketches from a while back? Well, as part of my conceptual design class, I had to create busts or maquettes of my characters. Which I did over the weekend. They're all the size of my palm (or smaller) in actuality.

This guy is my fave

Never done any sculpting before, but actually really liked it. Even did a fourth one for the fun of it. Maybe I'll have to do some more of it soon. It's funny, cause I've designed the characters to look stylistically a certain way - a bit more cartoony, but when I sculpted them, my mind switched gears and I was suddenly doing realistic versions of them. So it'll be interesting to see how they look now when I draw them again.

170

The B&W of my Avengers Periodic Heroes post. This bad boy measures 22 inches wide by 17 inches high. It was a lot of fun to draw. I had a blast. For the most part, I like how it came out. Always things to do better next time.

169

Okay, so here's a piece I just did for a guy I met at comic con. Great guy, promised him a drawing. He likes noir comics - like Scalped or Criminal. So, I got a tad carried away and did this cover-style illustration in the vein of Sean Phillips and pulp novel covers.

Then I tried a few filters for different effects:

Which do you like best?

I may (at some point) add some cover text, maybe some color, and some texture to make it look like a real novel cover.

168

Here's the B&W version of my Periodic Heroes post for the week. Decided to have some fun with the Street Fighter theme.

167

These are my first post-SDCC pages. This is a 5-page tryout for a new project I was told about. Fingers crossed they like it.

It was a fun challenge cause the story jumps between 1970s Vietnam and 33 AD Jerusalem. So a LOT of research. It was entirely out of my comfort zone, but I ended up liking it. Hope you do too!